


what a time it was, it was

by diana_hawthorne (stsgirlie)



Category: Cracks (2009)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 13:44:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5336222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stsgirlie/pseuds/diana_hawthorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is the first to arrive for this weekend, this reunion Miss Nievan and Fuzzie (Fuzzie, in a mental home now, on leave for a few precious days) have arranged – for reasons that she suspects but cannot articulate without feeling all the symptoms of heart failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what a time it was, it was

the picture is of happiness,  
the story is not. happiness  
is a garden walled with glass:  
there’s no way in our out.  
in paradise, there are no   
stories, because there are no  
journeys. it’s loss and regret  
and misery and yearning  
that drive the story forward,  
along its twisted road.  
-margaret atwood, the blind assassin

This is the picture: seven girls, all in the same uniform (all with subtle differences barely discernible in the grainy image), on the stone steps of some imposing edifice.

The photograph, edges still as sharp as the day it was developed, has been tucked into a book for years, forgotten. The book, too, has lain unremembered (but not forgotten) on the bottom of steamer trunks, carried in carpetbags, still smelling faintly of its first owner’s perfume, not opened since 1935.

But she finds it again, along with the now-empty perfume bottle, her fingers half-caressing the never-forgotten contours, on the day she receives a postcard from Poppy (‘You are coming back, aren’t you? I need to see you.’). The picture slides out, insidiously, spitefully, and the combination of so many reminders of her past overwhelms her.

She has to go back, she decides now. To see the school, her friends... to see the other members of the team, the people who share her dreadful, terrible secret. For the first time in years, she feels her old self again, sees who she used to be lurking just around the corner... the girl with the hay-coloured hair, as Laurel once called her, in a poem she had written for Miss G...

Miss G.

She is still on Stanley Island, she knows. Once, when she was drunk and regretful and peculiarly nostalgic for the diving team and everything it had meant to her, she had gone through the address book that she keeps meticulously accurate, (for reasons unknown to her) dialling the one telephone number she swore she would never call.

Her voice, deeper now and wavering from the alcohol, was still recognised by her former teacher, the woman she had once loved, once aspired to be. And indeed, she still holds one of her lessons, at least, close to her heart.

But she did not say that, that night, she did not bring up the happy memories of those golden days before she came. She asked instead, desperate and sobbing and guilty, always guilty – ‘have you asked for forgiveness?’

There was an intake of breath, sharp, involuntary, before a voice she once knew so well said, ‘For what?’

She knew, in that moment, that she did what she had always done, which was to change the truth to fit the world she had created for herself. But fury still flooded her veins anyway, burning red and hot and angry through her. A dull clunk – the telephone slammed down – and then another, a louder crash as a shoe flew across the room, hitting the mirror.

The shattered mirror still remains on her wall, its pieces carestakingly put back together that next morning, the spider-web of cracks (and the word makes her laugh still, brittle – how many hours they had spent talking about their cracks! and how futile it all had been, in the end...) a constant reminder of...

And now she is going back, taking the train up the coast and then the ferry across, to the island, her island. Before she knows it, she actually is on the train, her suitcase plastered with stickers from exotic lands (like Fiamma’s, her mind whispers traitorously, like Miss G’s never was) at her feet, her clothes smartly cut, professional, her jewellery ornate and heavy and screaming of old money – showing no trace of the girl who used to run half-wild through the fields, who used to set the standard.

Miss Nievan’s car and driver are waiting for her at the station – the same car, the same driver –and she refuses to let memory get the better of her just yet, allowing the chauffeur to open the car door for her and then put her suitcase in the boot. She runs her fingers over the glossy wood lining the windows, her fingerprints remaining.

This is familiar to her, and these are memories she can bear to look back on.

 

She is the first to arrive for this weekend, this reunion Miss Nievan and Fuzzie (Fuzzie, in a mental home now, on leave for a few precious days) have arranged – for reasons that she suspects but cannot articulate without feeling all the symptoms of heart failure. They will be staying in their old dormitory, and her feet carry her up the well-worn stairs, echoes of girls from the past echoing in the empty corridors. She stands still for a moment, seeing the flowers and the candles and the swirling girls that seem to be just there... she reaches out and then realises what she is doing, and the image vanishes.

She takes her old bed, of course, and her fingers find the name she had carved into the bedstead, that first night she slept here. She sits down, and hears the creak – familiar, so familiar, from those nights when Miss G used to tiptoe into the room and settle on the edge of the bed, where she sits now, her hand on her cheek and her voice whispering in her ear.

The door opens, another familiar sound, and for a moment she beholds a spectre – Miss G, floating down the narrow pathway between the beds, her feet bare – but a voice, one even more beloved and missed, says her name, and the fragile veils of memory once more disappear.

It is Poppy standing in front of her, as somehow she knew it would be.

‘Hello.’

It is not much, but it is enough, and with a sigh of profound relief, they fall into each other’s arms for the first time in twenty years, clinging.

It’s them against the world again, as if nothing had ever happened – Di and Poppy, contra mundum.


End file.
